Monday, March 11, 2013

Will New Pope End Chastity Requirement?

Celibacy is one of those
religion-tinged issues that won’t die down.The Roman Catholic Church has been earnestly trying to make priests into eunuchs for centuries,
but every now and then, someone questions the concept.They never got very far.The Church has remained adamant that its
clergy should pretend sex does not exist.

The need for a new pope has
encouraged opponents of celibacy to raise the issue again. They have some strong points.

For starters, the Church
didn’t always require celibacy.St.
Peter, Jesus’ lead disciple, was married.So were many of the early fathers of the faith.They had to be.They were Jewish, and that religion believes
in the “be fruitful and multiply” directive in Genesis.

In fact, the folks who
devised Catholicism would have been ignored if they weren’t married.That’s one of the concepts behind the novel, The Da Vinci Code, which proposes that
Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene.

Historically, a late 4th
century council finally decreed that "Bishops, presbyters, deacons, and
others with a position in the ministry are to abstain completely from sexual
intercourse with their wives and from the procreation of children. If anyone
disobeys, he shall be removed from the clerical office.”

Clergy could be married, just
not sexually active.

That decision was, naturally,
ignored.In the 11th and 12
centuries, Church officials were constantly complaining about priests with
families.Finally, in 1123, the First
Lateran Council issued the following laws:

Canon
3: We absolutely forbid priests, deacons, and subdeacons to associate with
concubines and women, or to live with women other than such as the Nicene
Council (canon 3) for reasons of necessity permitted, namely, the mother, sister,
or aunt, or any such person concerning whom no suspicion could arise.

Canon
21: We absolutely forbid priests, deacons, subdeacons, and monks to have
concubines or to contract marriage. We decree in accordance with the
definitions of the sacred canons, that marriages already contracted by such
persons must be dissolved, and that the persons be condemned to do penance.

Despite that, marriage only became a
complete block to priesthood starting with the 1917 Code of Canon Law.

Katharine von Bora, Luther's wife

The Church may want celibate
priests, but human nature continually trumped religious intentions.Sex has long been a great inducement for
anything.For example, Martin Luther
almost immediately married a former nun (right) after leaving the Church and founding
the Protestant movement.

He wrote later: "There is no more lovely, friendly, and
charming relationship, communion, or company than a good marriage."

Then, too, the Church is
coping with fewer priests.Young men
simply aren’t giving up the opportunity to have a family and children in the same numbers as before in order
to distribute Communion.From 1976 to 2010, according to the Vatican’s
own statistics, the number of priests increased by just 1.8 percent while the
religion added 59 percent more followers.

As a result, thousands of
churches are missing priests to officiate over the sacramental duties.To make matters worse, a large percentage of existing
priests are in Europe, but most Catholics live elsewhere.

The Vatican is also coping
with the reality that a large percentage of the remaining Catholic clergy are
gay.That’s only natural, considering
that the men in a profession that doesn’t allow marriage are more likely not to
be interested in marriage.There are no
statistics – few gay priests are likely to emerge from a closet any time soon –
but the issue has been the subject of an internal Vatican report.

Married Anglican priest John Fleming

As a final note, the Church
does allow married clergy. Mergers with the Anglican Church, among others, have
meant the Church has added married clergy.Those priests were allowed to stay with their wives.In addition, in South America, where an
unmarried man is not considered fit to counsel anyone, the Church permits
clergy to marry. A bishop in Argentina left his position, married and founded
the Movement of Married Priests and their Families in the 1960s.The group now has links throughout the
continent.

Under the circumstances, the
Church finds itself in the awkward position of maintaining a rule that is not
applied equally and is often ignored.Nevertheless, it
continues to argue for celibacy, quoting the New Testament texts that seem
apropos, ironically using the same technique that opponents used in the early
church while arguing on behalf of married priests.

A solution may be to make
chastity a voluntary option.After all,
the ban on eating meat on Fridays was changed from compulsory to optional.Allowing priests to marry is a vastly more
significant issue, but at least there’s precedent to change a time-honored
mandate.

The new pope will have the chance to introduce the change, culminating long years of effort to change an outdated priestly requirement.

Long-time
religious historian Bill Lazarus regularly writes about religion and religious
history.He also speaks at various
religious organizations throughout Florida.You can reach him at www.williamplazarus.net.He is the author of the famed Unauthorized
Biography of Nostradamus; The Last Testament of Simon Peter; The Gospel Truth: Where Did the Gospel
Writers Get Their Information; Noel:
The Lore and Tradition of Christmas Carols;and Dummies Guide to Comparative
Religion.His books are available on Amazon.com,
Kindle, bookstores and via various publishers.He can also be followed on Twitter.

You
can enroll in his on-line class, Comparative Religion for Dummies, at
http://www.udemy.com/comparative-religion-for-dummies/?promote=1

About Me

During his career, Bill has been a newspaper reporter, magazine writer/editor, advertising copywriter and writer/editor of NASCAR programs, among other jobs. He has won three international awards for stories and programs while working for International Speedway Corp. and was named 2000 Florida Feature Writer of the Year.
He has published four books to date and his writing has appeared in hundreds of local, regional, state and national publications.